High-resolution digital imagery systems have only recently been made available to the general public. Presently, adequate display systems are very expensive and contain much more technology than is necessary for viewing large images in real time. Examples of such systems are Silicone Graphics, Inc.'s Onyx® family of computing systems (Mountain View, Calif.).
Less elaborate systems that are capable of loading/reading an image over two gigabytes in size will pass the image contained on the disk drive through a 3D graphics engine before displaying it. Due to the current speed limitations of these 3D graphics engines, the quality of the image displayed on the screen is poor. Such systems read the image from the hard drive as a bmp, rgb, or tif file.
Patented systems and methods that attempt to improve the management and display of images are described herein below. The contents of these disclosures are incorporated by reference herein.
A System for Managing Tiled Images Using Multiple Resolutions is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. Re. 36,145. The system defines an address space for a virtual memory that includes an image data cache and a disk. An image stack for each source image is stored as a full resolution image and a set of lower-resolution subimages. Each tile of an image may exist in one or more of five different states as follows: uncompressed and resident in the image data cache, compressed and resident in the image data cache, uncompressed and resident on disk, compressed and resident on disk, and not loaded but recreatable using data from higher-resolution image tiles.
A Method for Storage and Retrieval of Large Digital Images is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,710,835. Image compression and viewing are implemented with (1) a method for performing DWT-based compression on a large digital image with a computer system possessing a two-level system of memory and (2) a method for selectively viewing areas of the image from its compressed representation at multiple resolutions and, if desired, in a client-server environment.
A method enabling a Fast Processed Screen Image is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,222,562. The method includes a display process for displaying predetermined image data in a computer that includes a processor, a fast memory, and a video system having a video memory. The method includes the steps of writing contents from a block of the fast memory to a first memory during a computer execution period, the fast memory having an access time that is less than an access time for the video memory; writing predetermined image data into the block of the fast memory; processing the predetermined image data from the fast memory; and writing the processed predetermined image data to the video memory.
A Method and System for Panorama Viewing is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,192,393. The method includes storing an image in tiled form on a server, receiving at a server from a client a request for at least a portion of the image, transmitting from the server to the client at least one tile corresponding to the at least a portion of the image requested by the client, and carrying out an individual tile-wise perspective correction on said at least one tile.
There are presently few systems that are adequate for managing and viewing large images. Those that are available (e.g., those by Silicone Graphics, Inc.) have a number of disadvantages including their high cost, high energy consumption, and large size and mass. There is clearly a need in the art for a system that can manage and display large images that overcomes these deficiencies.